Paulina & Fran (14 page)

Paulina rose from the bed and followed the phantom into the bathroom. Stray pubic hairs were visible on the checkerboard floor. An insistent drip had worn away the porcelain sink, leaving a rust stain. Julian’s body in the act of peeing disgusted her. Paulina found herself examining his gray toothbrush, the worn bristles sticking in all directions. Her legs were now completely absent of magic. The toothbrush displeased her. A crusty accumulation of paste sat low in its bristles. She threw it in the garbage can.

“What’s the meaning?” said Julian, his penis soft, his balls slack.

“I’m giving you mine,” Paulina said, pointing to the new one she had brought. Julian snickered at her, then brushed his teeth in an exaggerated manner.

A
t school, Julian had resented how much time and energy Paulina and Fran stole from him. They sought him out in the editing room. They kept him from his work. And when they stayed away, he compulsively summoned them back—mentally replaying their latest dramas, desiring one, then suddenly the other. During crits, he’d said little to help the flawed films of his classmates and had made no lasting friendships.

After school, he’d moved into his dead uncle’s apartment and spent his summer days walking the streets of Pittsburgh. Past the dim-colored houses, the garages built into hills, he smiled at the McBubbles Car Wash sign, the Heinz sign. He peered into abandoned Blockbusters, was heckled by a homeless man who called him Slim. He glared at the Carnegie Mellon kids in Warhol T-shirts, jealous of the anticipation on their bright faces.

He met Internet dates at crumb-covered coffee shops—
dental hygienists who didn’t take his ambitions seriously, starry-eyed college students who talked over him, sequins flashing that they’d
rather be dancing
. Drunken dates used him as a sounding board, recounting their bad childhoods and newfound allergies. Perhaps most frustrating were the bookish girls who messaged back and forth with him about novels and movies, never responding to his invitation to meet, satisfied to write letters until their deaths.

Eventually he’d fallen in love with Michelle, one of his married students, a musician and composer hoping one day to get a PhD. Michelle had more grace than Paulina and Fran combined. She was smarter than him, she was sensible, but her husband limited every aspect of their time together. Julian saw him in framed photographs in their house and once at the butcher’s counter at the store, buying more frozen shrimp than one person could eat.

Guilt aside, the affair revived him. He started writing movies and taking walks again. He read books with drawings of flowers on their covers, helplessly psychedelic, or tired, limp pen-and-ink drawings of Japanese fish. He cooked for Michelle and took her on weekend trips when her husband was away on business. Julian fantasized the husband’s death or mysterious disappearance, but the man kept returning unscathed.

When the affair ended and Michelle no longer responded
to his texts or e-mails, Julian fell into the same lovesick dread he’d felt at school. Unshowered and brooding, he watched all the Bond movies sequentially, unable to make himself do laundry or go to the supermarket. He joined Facebook, waiting for Fran to appear, but she had never liked the Internet, had never understood how it worked. He remembered how she’d researched her art history papers in the library, instead of using Google the way he’d shown her.

Julian spent his days on the Internet, reading all the different kinds of news, tracking the weather he watched through his window. He watched graphic videos of assassinations, illegally downloaded programs he didn’t need and didn’t use. He lingered in the comments sections, where the conversation always turned irrelevant and ugly. The Internet misled him. It took him so many places he forgot to leave his desk.

Julian and Fran spent hours on the phone, having long, convoluted heart-to-hearts. One Friday, after work, Fran finally went to the train station and bought a ticket to Pittsburgh. Julian had offered to come visit her many times, but she was embarrassed by her small town and the eccentric neighbors she’d unconsciously befriended. How could she explain that she and Violet did
puzzles
together and drank hot chocolate? Her Ohio apartment was just normal. It wasn’t painted the bright colors of the art school. It had no
funny shrines to Johnny Cash, no florescent rock installations in the bathroom.

On the train, Fran recalled young Julian seducing her. He’d been a thin dream of someone’s. She remembered the frazzled hairs pointing away from his erection, his intense stare. She started drafting a letter to Gretchen in her head.
You won’t believe this, but I’m about to see Julian after so many years! And he’s single, he says. And I’m definitely single. And I brought condoms . . .

When she got to Pittsburgh she walked languidly around the station, half-smiling in case he was watching from across the room. She wanted to see him before he saw her, but he was nowhere.

At the line of sinks in the bathroom, she wet a curl of hers that had separated. She listened to two girls laughing and smoking in one of the stalls.
I think he stood me up, Gretchen. Isn’t this absurd?
All the sinks had automatic faucets, but one was running even though no one was near it. Fran tried to fix it, waving her hands under its stream, but the faucet would not turn off. She let it run. With nothing else to do, she examined her face in the mirror, pleased with the face that looked back at her, though she tried to keep this satisfaction from the strangers walking past.

When she left the bathroom, Julian was there. He gave her a big hug. Fran pressed her face hard into his coat. “I’m
sorry I’m late,” he said. “I would have texted you, but you’re the only person on earth without a cell phone.” She demurred proudly. “I borrowed my neighbor Joel’s car to pick you up.” He took her hand and they walked to the parking lot, feeling young and watched.

Julian wanted to kiss Fran when they got in the car, but she was looking wistfully into the distance and he didn’t want to rush things. “Are you into this?” he asked, starting the engine.

“What?”

“This. Me. Pittsburgh. Joel’s Volvo. The weather.”

“I’m into it,” Fran said. “I feel good.” She leaned over and kissed him.

Julian led her up the three flights to his apartment. Fran gave him the old, good feeling. He wouldn’t push her away this time. Fran could get him over Michelle, the way Michelle had gotten him over Fran, the way Fran had gotten him over Paulina. He looked at Fran’s profile approvingly. Looking at her, he could remember them splayed on his bed that one summer, stiffly going to their first fancy restaurant, filming her in the bathtub with his Bolex.

They walked into his apartment and Fran set down her bag. “Do you have a mirror?” she asked Julian, touching her hair. Already her hair felt different than it had at the station. Every day it seemed to get dryer.

“There’s a small one in the bathroom,” he said. She wandered toward it. His apartment was like hers, absent of joy. A lonely painting hung unevenly off the wall, its thrift store price tag still glued on. To look in his dusty bathroom mirror was to see oneself through a stranger’s eyes.

The sex was as good as it had been, was made better by her sexless time in Ohio. Julian gave her his love back. He treated each part of her body like a precious thing that told the story of mankind, even her elbows and earlobes. He listened intently as she reluctantly told him about the Bushwick loft, Gretchen’s success, the test questions she lay awake creating in Ohio.

Fran felt her old personality whirling around her. She teased him about the copy of
Mein Kampf
in his bookcase. “Is that to scare away your one-night stands? You should have a whole shelf like that. A shelf of horror.” Julian laughed.

“I do! I have some medical textbooks,” he squinted across the room.

“
A History of Cannibalism
,” she said. Every time he laughed she felt relief. She’d found a loose thread from her past and could follow it back to herself.

The next morning, sunlight danced on Fran’s face. Julian reached for her and held her. His radio started playing music. Fran looked at a spider’s web that stretched between Julian’s
dresser and the wall. The spider was alive like her. Some life energy connected her to it and to everything.
The future was going to be easy!
Fran thought, rummaging through her bag for underwear.
She didn’t need to meet a new person! She didn’t need to change!

She saw it on the floor while getting dressed. “It’s hers,” Fran said. The hair clip looked tiny on the floor, but she recognized it. Suddenly, Fran recalled Paulina’s voice, her unnerving cackle, the foreign elegance she lent a place.

Julian sat up in his bed. “She’s visited once or twice. She called me last month and it got me thinking of you again.” He tried to gauge if she was jealous. Jealousy was a good sign.

Fran stared at the hair clip, letting her eyes blur and focus on it. “Once or twice?” she asked him.

“Twice,” he said.

“Fuck,” Fran said. “I feel crazy.”

Why couldn’t he just pick one of them?
Fucking flip a coin
, she thought. And why did Paulina still want him? Just to torture her? Fran’s head throbbed. And now she was going to cry in front of Julian, who was never moved by tears.

“Come back to bed, babe.”

Fran bent down and picked it up.

“What are you going to do, smell it?” Julian asked.

Fran cursed him off. The hair clip was the same kind Paulina had used in college; it might even have been one she’d
worn back then. Fran put the hair clip in her hair. It made a satisfying click.

“That’s it,” Julian said, relaxing. “It’s yours. This is all yours. I don’t need to see her anymore.” This was true. He felt it like a candle lighting his being. When Joel had asked about Paulina, Julian had described her as “a benevolent monster who fucks well.” Of course she was funny too, and smart, and had bought him a huge steak at the fanciest restaurant in Pittsburgh. He loved her, but she diminished in his memory.

“Really, I just want you,” he said.

“Yeah?” Fran crawled onto his bed and Julian pulled the covers around her. He kissed her face and her neck and her hair and her shoulders.

“Yeah,” he said, pulling her shirt back off. They started kissing again, and grabbing each other. Julian got on top of her. Fran imagined Paulina in quick muddled flashes, each vision bringing her closer to orgasm.

“I don’t care if you see her again,” Fran said, naked against Julian. “But it is a little nostalgic of her.”

“And it’s not of you?” Julian turned off the lamp, filling the room with a bluish doom.

“She’s the one who’s so against nostalgia.”

Julian shrugged. “She started this hair product business,” he said. Fran laughed. “You haven’t heard about it?” Julian
asked. “
SUPERCURL
. It’s all over the place. They’re even building a salon in Pittsburgh.” Fran had seen ads for the product, but she’d had no idea it was Paulina’s. She acted unimpressed, but her jealousy spread like a rash.

“I really wish I could paint again,” said Fran, instantly regretting it. This statement inevitably lead to the tired discussion of fumes vs. studio costs, oil vs. acrylic, lukewarm suggestions involving watercolor or Photoshop. It reminded her of a visual arts test question.

“Just use acrylic,” Julian said. “Who’s stopping you?”

Acrylic paint was uninspiring; it lacked that oily, sexy smell. Fran kissed him to shut him up. They heard a hacking cough through the wall.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Alma,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Fran said.

“No, it can’t be good.”

The next morning Julian made her pancakes, and it was still fun. They hadn’t run out of jokes. Still, Fran told herself she was never coming back. It felt good and eerie to be near him, but she didn’t need him. While he was going to the bathroom, she took Paulina’s old student card, which she’d all these years kept in her wallet, and left it facedown next to a dead cactus on his table.

At Jane’s opening, Fran was startled to see that Jane was very talented. Her paintings were intricate Bosch-like scenes of caves and valleys crowded with people from different time periods looking at their cell phones, pointing guns, skinning animals, proposing to each other. The figures were just an inch or two, Fran estimated, but each one had a personality painted in.

The gallery filled with people. Good music was playing. There was a spread of food on a long table. Everyone was excited by the paintings. They seemed like something Fran had imagined, had meant to paint herself. Something she would eventually have stumbled upon.

Fran wondered if Paulina was with Julian this weekend and knew she was.

“Fran!” Jane called, and walked over holding the hand of a tall, slender blond. “This is Deena,” Jane said, squeezing the girl’s hand. The girl wore a low-cut black dress. Her hair was shiny and straight. It glistened under the lights.

“Great to meet you,” Deena said. Fran stared at them. Was it possible they were
together
? They couldn’t be. Fran would have heard about it. Fran would have been able to sense a vibe from Jane, a gay vibe. Fran got lost looking at Deena’s lips. Deena had dark green eyes and lines on her eyelids where her mascara had smudged. As Fran watched Jane and Deena talk
and laugh, it seemed so natural, something she and Paulina could have been, long ago in the college town, without Julian, or Marvin, or any jerk with nice eyes. “Are you a painter too?” Deena asked.

“Oh, no, I’m Jane’s coworker,” Fran said haltingly. Jane and Deena laughed as if Fran had said something hysterical. They were drunk on love. Fran looked at the paintings, wanting to own them. She laughed too, wanting to be a part of whatever was between Jane and Deena, whatever elusive luck they’d mined together, whatever delivered their happiness to them.

That night, Fran took out her cracked watercolors, her stiff acrylics, her congealed oils. She painted on the cardboard box her desk chair came in. She painted cartoonish blobs, naked women, crossed-out faces, burning cities, hairlike forms she turned into clouds, dogs wearing clothes. Everything she painted looked very much like her work before art school, like the doodles she’d drawn in high school, that she still drew during Levrett-Mercer meetings.

The red boots were by the door when Fran walked into Julian’s. “She left them for you,” Julian said, as if they were all roommates. Paulina had worn the boots at Eileen’s thing; Fran had complimented her on them. In Norway, Paulina had
looked for boots like these, finding nothing like them. Fran tried them on. They were too big and didn’t match her outfit, but she wore them all weekend.

Fran asked so many questions about Paulina that Julian finally said, “Why don’t you just call her? I can give you her number.”